Tuesday, July 15, 2008
The 0870 / 0845 Scam: Are Companies Profiting From You?
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0870 / 0845 Scam Numbers
You might find a lot of service providers in the UK numbers that start with 08x - like 0800, 0808, 0870 and 0845. You see these numbers everywhere these days. These are non geographic numbers. In other words you can offer your service all over the UK and be perceived as a national player, even though you might be based in a single town. These number also tend to be memorable.
0800 and 0808 are Freephone numbers. That is - they are free to call in the UK from any landline.
A new crop of numbers were introduced - called 084x and 087x numbers. These numbers are revenue-share numbers. To the business procuring them, they are told that end users prefer a memorable 084x or 087x number. And because these are revenue share numbers, they can make money when you call them. Keeping customers on hold for just 15 minutes for a 10ppm call can really add up. Many providers are now using these 0870 and 0845 numbers. Banks and tech support lines are particularly fond of them. (You might notice a true 0800 or 0808 Freephone for sales inquiries and and 0870/0845 number for support.) And to an increasing extent, we’re also seeing them make their way into small businesses and the sole means of contact. This is wrong.
This is a key point - you need the 08x number to route to geographic phone number. Many UK organisations which previously could be reached by a geographical number now only publish an 0845 number. Now you know why!
The original idea was that if you are a large organization with many shops, you can have a single memorable number that is routed to the location nearest the caller and still be charged a local rate. Those rules changed in 2004: it is now cheaper to call a normal an 01/02 number direct. Most people with a basic phone package even have unlimited calls to 01/02 numbers.
There are several sites which provide more information on the subject:
Charges paid by the caller for 084x/087x calls are set by each phone company individually. Charges can vary greatly, especially when the call originates from a UK mobile or a non-UK number
Not all numbers are created equal. 0800 and 0808 are Freephone numbers. These numbers mean you pay for your customers to call you. But while they are completely free within the UK, if they are called by mobiles or VoIP providers (like Skype or Vonage), they too may be much more expensive.
For this reason, we want to be accessible to all our customers. Within the UK you can call us on Freephone 0808-1-VORARI (0808-1-86.72.74) - which we hope is memorable. But from your mobile or abroad - you can call us on +44 203 002 3761. Ideally we hope you’ll use our landline number - as it is cheaper for us, but we will never try to extort money from you.
We refuse to do business with companies that only have an 084x/087x numbers - we value our customers.
Posted by
Nagib on 07/15 at 01:54 PM
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Sunday, June 22, 2008
Firefox 3 released. Faster and more reliable
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Many of you will already know that firefox 3 was released last week. To those that don’t, Firefox 3 is the next major version of Mozilla’s browser. If you are still using Firefox 2 you should definitely upgrade.
We’ve been running with Firefox 3 in beta form for several months to ensure a smooth migration with the Zimbra web client on both the mac and the PC and it is FAST. Now that is ready for general availability there is no reason not to upgrade.
Find out more at: http://www.firefox.com
Posted by
Nagib on 06/22 at 03:20 PM
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Zimbra: Mobile Me for business users
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Recently, Apple announced MobileMe. To call it just a re-branding of their existing .Mac would be a disservice. It really packs much more value into the package many of us have come to know and love. But their “exchange for the rest of us” tag line, while catchy, is not really appropriate. Apples’ service is designed for the individual. It is called Mobile “ME” for a reason - it allows you to do limited sharing with your friends and family - but it doesn’t really help when you need to collaborate with others.
More importantly, it only supports their iPhone, so mobile clients other than the iPhone are out of luck. I love the iPhone - and I can’t wait to get their 3G version, and this might not really be a decision for a family either - just be sure that all your family members have iPhones too. But it doesn’t cut it as a business platform where you have to accept diversity in clients.
“Exchange for the rest of us” is more apt in reference to Zimbra.
Zimbra lets you share files with your colleagues - but it offers you the ability to password protect the access, or to make your files public.
They support a wide variety of mobile clients, including the iPhone.
They allow you book appointments and check other folks schedules before putting out a meeting invitation.
And it works seamlessly with Outlook, provides native OS-X sync services support and even supports Linux clients. Not to mention the award winning AJAX browser interface both online and off-line. True freedom of choice.
At a similar price point per user per month.
Need to collaborate with others? Try Zimbra.
Posted by
Nagib on 06/22 at 03:19 PM
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Tuesday, May 06, 2008
Dreamforce Europe 2008 - May 7th & 8th
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We’ll be at salesforce.com’s first European user and developer conference, held at the Barbican Centre in London. For more information on Dreamforce visit Dreamforce Europe
We all start using customer relationship management (CRM) for different reasons. And yet many people still don’t even understand what CRM is and how it can be of value to the organization. While everyone has different definitions, a working definition for me is the ability to add intelligence to your contact data. When you look at it this way, I’m often amazed to find many people still use CRM platforms as a glorified address book.
We’re a small company - so growth is a big priority for us. So while many people are offering some valuable solutions about how to analyse your data and to use a strategic selling approach - My priority is different: Get traffic to our site and convert users through as many channels as possible. So I’m using CRM with several keyword search schemes, like google along with dedicated campaign pages. But I’m advertising the old fashioned way too: magazine adverts, trade publications and of course exhibitions.
I’m most excited about being able to use saleforce to track my leads - where they’re coming from, what there responding to. Should be a fun 2 days. Will post an update after the event.
Posted by
Nagib on 05/06 at 08:37 PM
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Saturday, April 19, 2008
Internet World 2008
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Always a fun time of year. Some much to explore - I do wish it was spread out a bit more. We are very interested in the seminars dealing with online advertising, and communication methods and delivery . The down side with these seminars is that there can be a lot of overlap. One area that has become very clear to us is that marketing copy or content creation requires a lot of thought. Communication of the ideas as succinctly as possible. What areas are of interest to you?
http://www.internetworld.co.uk/topics.html
Posted by
Nagib on 04/19 at 01:49 PM
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Tuesday, April 15, 2008
Welcome to Vorari!
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Welcome to our new site! There are still a few glitches which we will be fixing in realtime. We have worked long and hard to launch a clean and standards compliant site. Over the coming weeks we’ll be adding a lot of content and launching our forums and wiki in due course.
Building a proper website is a difficult and time consuming task. Usability and clean design, not to mention a well thought out structure for organising content is extremely important. Todays users access content through a variety of browsers and mobile devices and separating this content from the design was critical. Ease of access for adding new content is also very important requiring a standards-friendly content management system (CMS). We hope we have addressed all these design requirements properly and we look forward to your comments and feedback in the coming weeks and months.
The VORARI team.
Posted by
Nagib on 04/15 at 03:06 PM
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